Guardian Hacks SXSW started with an itch. I wanted to explore some more experimental coverage, and was frustrated by the grind of relentless tech blogging and the feeling of being disconnected from the creative development community. Couldn't we collaborate on something? How about building a team of journalists and developers to cover the South by Southwest festival?

Two months later, Google agreed to sponsor what became Guardian Hacks SXSW. Last weekend, 100 developers, designers and journalists – including several from continental Europe – spent the weekend at the Guardian creating a collaborative, experimental toolbox of tricks for next month's SXSW music, film and interactive festival in Texas.

From the hardened war reporter who'd never been to a hack weekend, to the seasoned developer with a string of successful hacks under his belt, no one was quite sure what was going to be built over the next 36 hours. The combination of games designers, music data specialists, journalists and data wizards certainly made for a rich mix of ideas. But what characterised the group was a curiosity and an openness, which shows in Articlr, the winner of best hack, made up of a team who didn't know each other before Saturday morning.

Articlr represented a big theme of the weekend: productivity. A simple, full-featured composition tool for writing news on location, it drew coos of approval from the journalists in the audience, though these Zemanta-like applications have been at our disposal for many years. Another, built by developer Iain Collins and two of Le Monde's technology team, improved on Cover it Live, the live blogging software, while Fluffbox helped news editors compile tagged footage from social networks within one editing tool. All these were the product of probing conversations with frustrated journalists.

Many of the hacks of the weekend could be seen as complementary to editorial, from contextual music players to playlists for SXSW that day. The Guardian's own developers worked on a group of hacks that populate SXSW artist pages with videos, biographies, tunes and links, which rolled out live on guardian.co.uk three days later.

We can claim this project as a success, not least because as a result of all this collaboration and hard work it looks as if several hacks will be developed into standalone commercial products. A bidding war has already unfolded over one of them. That's the ideal result: commercial success for the developers, and a wake-up call to the news publishers.

Why should this kind of imagination and insight be at the fringes of what we do? Why do journalists have to struggle with outdated and inefficient tools, when just a peek at the outside world reveals how simple the alternative is? Charged with curating the world's information, with mastery of storytelling and with the responsibility of speaking truth to power, journalists have no less of an obligation to explore and exploit the very best ways to develop their craft. But institutionalised journalism has built a wall around itself, a wall that conceals and disconnects, one that rewards introspection and laborious conventions. For one weekend we breached that wall, but our bigger challenge is to knock it down.